Best of Linux So far, in my look at Linux compared to Mac and Windows, I’ve covered music players, photo organizers, and video editors. But all those apps – and all the documents they create – are lost if your hard drive crashes, your laptop takes a spill, or some other catastrophe strikes.

If you have documents, you must have a backup solution – Mac users at least have the option of Time Machine and Windows offers Live Drive. In this final installment of my look at the Linux desktop, I’ll assess how Linux stacks up against backup solutions for Windows and OS X.

Lets just imagine that we are a programming gurus. We have written all sorts of programs from spread sheets, financial, graphical drawing, GIS and even lotto programs. We have done silly little programs which move animated faces around the screen and written programs for constructing kitchens. When it comes to programming in windows there is nothing we cannot do.

Desktop

The difference is that things are happening in reverse this time. Linspire, nearing its demise, was becoming more “open” with their Freespire distribution efforts, while Ubuntu is locking down default installations with its Unity desktop. And the Ubuntu application store is demonstrating a remarkable similarity to that of Linspire’s CNR software management concept.

Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, today released a Beta version of it’s Linux alternative to Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. The software, named Userful MultiSeat Linux 2011TM, turns 1 Linux computer into 10 high performance independent computer stations. It offers the same features as Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, plus some additional features MultiPoint lacks such as hundreds of free educational software applications, and a suite of tools for managing classroom computers.

Calgary, AB – Userful Corporation, the global leader in Linux desktop virtualization, today released a Beta version of its Linux alternative to Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. The software, named Userful MultiSeat Linux 2011TM, turns 1 Linux computer into 10 high performance independent computer stations. It offers the same features as Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, plus some additional features MultiPoint lacks such as hundreds of free educational software applications, and a suite of tools for managing classroom computers. Userful MultiSeatTM also has higher video performance than Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, and at just $59 per seat (education pricing, commercially available Q4 2010), and with no server licensing costs, it is also a lower cost alternative.

Server

IBM should be grateful that Linux and open source relational databases like MySQL (now from Oracle) and PostgreSQL (which is commercially supported by EnterpriseDB are about as unfamiliar as Vulcan is to those who speak Klingon but have managed a little broken English. (Yes, that was a metaphor for Unix or Linux, IBM i, and Windows.) Because as cheap as the more familiar Windows entry servers are compared to entry and midrange Power7 servers, Linux systems are even less costly.

Kernel Space

Linux hasn’t got any Freer between the Linux-2.6.33-libre announcement, back in March, and the present announcement, that marks the release of Linux-2.6.36-libre. Linux now contains more non-Free Software, and more drivers in its Free core that require separately distributed non-Free Software to function.

Applications

A new release of the excellent photo manager shotwell isn’t that far off and from development so far it is packing a few new goodies…

Shotwell 0.8 will allow for downloading of any recorded movie files present on your connected camera. The team say that ‘it makes sense to catalogue videos and photos in the same app, using an unified interface.‘

Last week I received a heads up about a new web application launching today from a company called BetterMeans with an impressive goal: to build the infrastructure (processes, technology, governance, etc.) to make an open organizational structure like we talk about here on opensouce.com a reality.

Proprietary

Without anybody noticing, Opera has amassed one of the world’s most valuable commercial resources. And the funny thing is, it isn’t going to do anything evil with it. Marketing, new media and technology pundits may have to rethink a few things once they digest the size of Opera’s well-kept secret. It is possible the gurus may have spent years barking up the wrong tree.

GNOME Desktop

While I keep telling people that you don’t need to use the command line in order to use Linux, I find that it’s a useful and sometimes indispensable tool. I have a number of scripts and utilities that I use at the command line to get various jobs done.

Why? A lot of the time, especially if I’m trying to process a lot of information or a number of files at once, the command line is faster than a comparable GUI tool. Assuming that there is a GUI tool that can do what I do at the command line.

GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.

Mandriva, the publisher of the Mandriva Linux operating system, and the OpenVZ project announced today that the system Operating OpenVZ virtualization software will be included as part of the Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0.

OpenVZ is running on the server system software virtualization technology, built on Linux, which creates isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers ensure that applications are not incompatible and can be rebooted independently.

Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 is the basis of an open source infrastructure stable and profitable for organizations building on Linux.

Red Hat Family

Savvytek, a Red Hat Premier Business Partner and Certified Training Partner operating in Jordan, has taken an important step in strengthening its partnership with Red Hat by achieving accreditation as a Red Hat Ready Business Partner to operate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Qatar.

Fedora

In the end the impression I get from Fedora is that it is more a development and testing platform than it is a desktop for your average home user. There is very little multimedia support, no Flash, and (on the live CD) no office suite installed by default and the project maintains a short support cycle (about thirteen months). The project has a more friendly feel to it now than it did six months ago, but it is still targeting the more technically inclined members of the community who don’t mind working around the occasional quirk. If you like to stay on the cutting edge without being cut, or if you want to keep up with the technology going into Red Hat, then Fedora 14 is an excellent choice.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 43.20, +0.19, +0.44%) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the opening of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship program, recognizing college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. The Fedora Scholarship is awarded to one high school senior each year to assist with the recipient’s college or university education. This will mark the fourth year of this annual scholarship program as the Fedora Project continues to encourage young students to use and contribute to open source software.

Just as a quick reminder, the Fedora Board has been following a new schedule over the past month or so. This new schedule works as follows:

* Every Monday, the Board will meet via phone at 2 PM Eastern time (1900 UTC atm).
* Every other Friday (the next one is this Friday, 12 Nov), the Board will hold a public ‘office hours’ style questions & answers session in #fedora-board-meeting at 2 PM Eastern time.

Debian Family

You’re probably manipulating Debian packages everyday, but do you know what those files are? This article will show you their bowels… Surely they are more than file archives otherwise we would just use TAR archives (you know those files ending with .tar.gz). Let’s have a look!

Canonical/Ubuntu

That’s no accident. Yes, Ubuntu is based on Linux, and the Unity desktop is built on GNOME, but at this point I think Canonical has decided that everyone who’s ever going to use a “Linux” desktop is already there. Therefore, to broaden the Ubuntu Linux desktop base they needed to reach users who know nothing about Linux.

The release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system has been modified last week on the Ubuntu wiki. The distribution will still be released at the end of April 2011. The first Alpha version was supposed to be available for testing last Thursday, November 4th.

For Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), the Ubuntu developers decided to change the release schedule again, to 3 Alpha versions instead of 5, a single Beta release, and a Release Candidate. Here is the new release schedule for Ubuntu 11.04:

The Linux desktop has been around for more than a decade now. Despite its best efforts, and Microsoft’s dumbest missteps — I’m looking at you, Vista — it’s never owned more than a fraction of the market. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, plans on changing that with its Unity desktop.

Recently I blogged about some concerns that I have had about increasing disrespect in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture communities. My blog entry shared some of the work I started on an OpenRespect Declaration, but I wasn’t sure if I should publish it.

I did some thinking on this, and reviewed some of the fantastic comments on my blog, and I decided to go ahead and launch openrespect.org. There I have listed the declaration with a few extra points about:

* the importance of honesty (thanks Jef Spaleta for the suggestion)
* the importance of remembering that people pour their heart and soul into their work

A lot of you hate any kind of branding in wallpapers and hence will love the default wallpaper collection for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. But some of us including me won’t mind a bit of branding in wallpapers especially if the branding is all about Ubuntu and Linux. Try this simple, elegant collection of Ubuntu wallpapers.

In yet another recent announcement that had the Linux community looking like the proverbial “deer in headlights,” Canonical has announced that in an iteration of Ubuntu it might very well drop X Windows in favor of Wayland. This comes on the heels of Mark Shuttleworth’s recent announcement that 11.04 would see Ubuntu leave behind the GNOME Shell in favor of Ubuntu Unity. That was a tiny drop in the bucket compared to this latest consideration.

This headline caught my eye:Ubuntu To Ditch X For Wayland. Note the word ditch. This gives a negative spin on an otherwise positive story. Ubuntu is supporting Wayland which the person writing calls a “more modern alternative” to X and likes the decision. So why write it in a negative light if they are supporting something that is worthy of support?

There have been hundreds of such posts. Ubuntu Ditches GNOME or Ubuntu Dumps GNOME are examples. The theme here is that Canonical or Ubuntu are bad boys. Words like ditch and dump are succinct, but pejorative, implying that Ubuntu and Canonical are disloyal philanderers or worse.

Without being a X expert, some of the issues that were critical in the (announced) move from X server to Wayland

Hardware support : I strongly recommend to run Linux only on hardware with a well supported video driver : without a well supported driver, the experience can be daunting, especially on a thin-client. X was supposed to be hardware independent, lightweight and provide great performance.

However these fights had been lost long ago : I’ve learned the hard way that not all X drivers are equals : open-source or not, how many XV channels are supported, 3D (what version exactly, etc.). In fact, selecting good quality desktop or thin-client hardware is a service we sold to our customers !

Size matters : a default X.org server, on my desktop where I wrote this blog is 64Mb (without cache), 180Mb (with cache) on a Ubuntu 10.10, 64 bit with regular 3D effects. Well, on a phone with 256Mb or RAM or on an ARM based thin client with 64Mb, this is not good. I can imagine it also has an impact on battery life on the mobile devices.

To the logical mind, it is quite clear why Shuttleworth has taken these steps. He has tried, for some time, unsuccessfully, to get upstream projects to follow his vision for what GNU/Linux on devices – the desktop, the notebook, the netbook, the plethora of mobiles – should look and feel like.

Having failed to convince anyone, he has now decided that if Ubuntu is to continue to make headway, it has to distinguish itself from the rest. His model is Apple, which, despite having a much smaller share of the market than Microsoft, is still a major force with which to reckon in the tech space.

Shuttleworth isn’t in a great hurry; he appears to be fully aware of the magnitude of the changes he is undertaking, with statements like this about the switch to Wayland: “Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem.”

Flavours and Variants

A while back, I did a full review of Ubuntu Muslim Edition 10.04 on Desktop Linux Reviews. This time around I’ll be covering the 10.10 version of that distro. The official name of this distro is simply “Sabily,” and this particular release is dubbed “Al Quds.” However, I have simply renamed it “Ubuntu Muslim Edition 10.10″ for this quick look, to make it easier for folks to know exactly what it is.

For those in procurement jobs, the use of desktop productivity tools could be the best way for open source to become more widely adopted across the government, it was argued.

This is the view of the government’s deputy chief information officer Bill McCluggage, who reckons that there is still a lot to be done over the next few years to get a “level playing field for the open source environment”.

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Free Software developer and community builder from Iceland, has received the Nordic Free Software Award.

This annual prize was awarded on Saturday by Föreningen för Fri Kultur och Programvara and Free Software Foundation Europe at the Free Software Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) which took place in Gothenburg, Sweden this weekend.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Development of the browser was officially announced in April 2003 and originally called Phoenix — raising the ire of the trademark holders. Renaming it Firebird raised the ire of the free database software developers, so it was finally branded Firefox nine months before it’s inital release.

Education

It looks to me like Android, thanks to the phone market, is set to join server Linux as being ‘shiny’.

So I predict that the first school slates (as trailed in my previous blog) will be Google-Android powered (…or possibly the OLPC) and that young Africans will prefer them to multipoint ancient hardware….or did you pick the Windows 7 slate?

Business

Semi-Open Source

Given the ongoing and recently increased interest in the open core licensing strategy there have been numerous statements made about its relative popularity, the reasons for its adoption, and the impact it has on collaborative development.

As part of our recently released report on the evolution of open source-related business strategies we evaluated the strategies of 300 companies that are engaged in generating revenue from open source software.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

This past Wednesday, I showed up at Baltimore-Washington International for a flight to Providence, R.I. I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

Agents were funneling every passenger at this particular checkpoint through a newly installed back-scatter body imaging device, which allows the agency’s security officers to, in essence, see under your clothing. The machine captures an image of your naked self, including your genitals, and sends the image to an agent in a separate room. I don’t object to stringent security (as you will soon see), but I do object to meaningless security theater (Bruce Schneier’s phrase), and I believe that we would be better off if the TSA focused its attentions on learning the identity and background of each passenger, rather than on checking whether passengers are carrying contraband (as I suggested in this article, it is possible for a moderately clever person to move contraband through TSA screenings with a fair amount of ease, even with this new technology).

On Guantánamo, the only comments in the book that have so far emerged are insultingly flippant, which is disgraceful from the man who shredded the Geneva Conventions and authorized an unprecedented program of arbitrary detention, coercive interrogation and torture. In addition, Bush’s baleful legacy lives on in the cases of the 174 men still held, in the recent show trial of Omar Khadr, and in the complacency regarding the basis for detaining prisoners of the “War on Terror” — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — on which Barack Obama continues to rely, despite its formidable shortcomings.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Lisa Kellman of the Environmental Sciences Research Center at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, and her team have been investigating the impact that forest harvesting has on the underlying soil. It seems that the damage goes deeper than previously thought and lasts for much longer than traditionally assumed.

Finance

The New York Fed released data today that appeared to show total available credit card limits — the amount the banks will let us spend if we wish to do so — rose $69 billion to $2.77 trillion. That figure had been falling for seven consecutive quarters, and the reversal seemed significant to me.

But after I posted a blog pointing to the trend, the Fed called to say the numbers might be wrong. Then it said they are wrong. The actual total of credit lines is $2.68 trillion, down around $20 billion from the previous quarter.

The White House is intensifying negotiations with South Korea on revising a free-trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration, even though the accord still faces opposition from Democratic politicians, labor unions and the Ford Motor Company.

In an unusual detour, Sarah Palin waded into monetary policy Monday, lashing out at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and urging him to “cease and desist” his attempt to jumpstart the economic recovery by committing to buy up to $900 billion in U.S. government debt.

As any student of Economics 101 realises, you can control the price of something, or the quantity, but not both simultaneously. In announcing its decision to purchase an additional $600bn of treasuries last week, the Federal Reserve was presumably motivated to create additional stimulus to an economy, whose growth trajectory has hitherto been insufficient to make a dent in unemployment. Even Friday’s “good” unemployment numbers, where the US economy added 151,000 jobs, was not enough to reduce the current jobless rate of 9.6%.

It is a somewhat ironic coincidence that on the same day as the American electorate rejected out of hand any more talk of fiscal stimulus, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, writing in the Washington Post, reaffirmed his commitment to a different kind of stimulus – the monetary variety. Starting this month, and continuing up until mid-2011, the Fed intends to buy $600bn of US treasury bonds in the open market. This programme will be known as “quantitative easing 2″ or QE2; its express intention being to tackle unemployment. Unencumbered by an electorate resolutely opposed to a fiscal stimulus, some of the country’s finest monetary economists remain committed to stimulating the economy in an entirely different way.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

First, Paul believes that the federal government has minimal power to regulate how private property owners use their property, or how private business owners manage their businesses or employees. In Paul’s interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he explains that he opposes the ban on whites-only lunch counters because he “believe[]s in private ownership.” During his lengthy interview with Rachel Maddow, Paul explained that he supports the parts of the Civil Right Act of 1964 that limit government discrimination, but that he rejects the “one title” of the Act that limits private activities (for the record, there are at least two titles of the original Civil Rights Act that limit private actors. Title II prohibits discrimination by restaurants, hotels and other public accommodations; Title VII forbids employment discrimination). Similarly, in his interview with NPR, Paul explains that his shield surrounding private businesses extends well beyond the civil rights context. When asked how he feels about “the degree of oversight of the mining and oil-drilling industries,” Paul responded “I think that most manufacturing and mining should be under the purview of state authorities.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

My thinking lately is that the basic concept of copyright is flawed in the digital age. In the days of the first printing presses, the idea was that the creator of a work should have a head-start on the world for copying.

Last month, the Gnutella-based file-sharing client LimeWire was effectively outlawed after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA to shut the software down. Now, not even a month later, LimeWire is back as good as new. Not only has a secret dev team reanimated the hugely popular client, but they have also made a few significant changes which make it better and more streamlined than before.

Operation: Payback came roaring into the Internet landscape and left behind a slew of battered websites, a suspended P2P litigation campaign in the UK, an embarrassed law firm, and a humbled KISS frontman. In what may be a new method of Internet activism, or, as some would say, ‘hacktivism’, Operation: Payback has largely concluded its campaign after nearly two months of pillaging various anti-P2P websites. Let’s take look at this bizarre chapter of Internet history.

It all began innocently enough on September 18, 2010. Members of Operation: Payback concluded recruiting enough people across the 4chan message boards, and launched their raid on the MPAA.org’s website with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A lot of media sources will tell you that 4chan attacked the MPAA, but this is not correct. 4chan was merely used as an organizational platform. You’ll also hear this was organized by Anonymous. This too isn’t totally correct. Supporters of Operation: Payback definitely include some members of Anonymous and of 4chan, but the reality is that participants came from numerous organizations and groups, and indeed loners, from across the Internet.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again